


Appropriate

by Katarik



Category: 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
Genre: Chromatic Character, Gen, POV Character of Color, POV Female Character, POV Lesbian Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-03
Updated: 2011-01-03
Packaged: 2017-10-14 09:29:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/147823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katarik/pseuds/Katarik
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is how she makes it go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Appropriate

When Suki decides she's going to be a racer, she is five, and she has just heard the boy next door say clearly that she can't play driver with them, because she's a girl, and girls don't drive.

Suki knows this isn't true. Her mother had raced in Tokyo. The living room is filled with pictures of NASCAR drivers -- Louise Smith, Wendell Scott, Betty Skelton, and her mother's favorite, the new driver Janet Guthrie. Suki has sat behind the wheel of a car and heard her mother explain how American automobiles work. She has already held a wrench and seen her mother's perfectly-manicured hands filthy with grease.

Suki spends the next ten years learning everything her mother knows about how cars work. It is her mother that teaches her to drive, and she teaches her in Tokyo-style, graceful sweeps and curves of motion. Suki imagines that if someone watched her mother drive from above, it would look like calligraphy. Poetry in the hum of an engine.

Suki does not have her mother's gift, and she knows it. Her mother raced for the joy of it. Suki races for the speed, and the freedom, and to prove she can.

Suki's part-time job waitressing is to finance modding the car her mother buys her. Her money goes into her engines, and the car pays her back -- Suki spends the next three years learning how to drive like herself, rather than her mother, and every race she wins buys her another part.

When Suki is eighteen, she moves across the city to where the real racing is done, not kids in high school who think the only reason for a girl to be at the track is to stare at her tits.

Suki is unimpressed to discover that that doesn't change among the adult racers.

She paints her car pink, the sleek clean lines of it what her psych teacher would've called Suki announcing her femininity as both invitation and warning. She wears her hair long, her makeup subtle but not invisible, wears belly-baring shirts and pants so tight people will know whether or not she's got panties on.

Suki is a girl. Every damn body is going to know it, especially when she beats them.

She considers this appropriate.


End file.
